On the Market: Curtains for the Hustler Club; DOT Battles Theft of Public Art Project

So much for the strip tease: the Hustler Club may be reborn as office condos geared toward the entertainment industry, Crain’s reports. Developers Jack Guttman and Steve Schwartz having reached a tentative deal to buy out the block-long strip club complex, which runs along 12th Avenue between 51st and 52nd streets.

The city has awarded controversial homeless shelter operator Aguila Inc. a five-year, $15 million contract to operate a shelter in the Bronx, Capital New York reports. Last year, comptroller John Liu demanded that the city cut ties with Aguila due to a combination of bad fiscal practices and unclean, unsafe shelters. Aguila claims that it has rectified the problems.

In this week’s The Hunt, two sisters who grew up on Staten Island decide to team up and search for an Upper East Side two bedroom. For once, neither the demands nor the budget of the column’s subjects are excessive: the sisters were looking for apartment with two bedrooms of roughly equal size that would cost $3,000 a month or less.

Watch what you spray near air vents: a podiatry school in East Harlem was evacuated after someone sprayed a deodorant near the intake for the ventilation system, DNAInfo reports, sending several students to the hospital with respiratory distress.

In another case of unfortunate proximity, historians are fighting to keep a dog run away from the site of a Revolutionary War memorial in Van Cortlandt Park, according to The Riverdale Press.

Retail rents are rising rapidly along lower Broadway, according to Crain’s, shooting up 22 percent from a year before to $277 a square foot, which attributes the sharp increase to anticipation of more retailers coming to Brookfield Place and the World Trade Center. And unlike every other neighborhood in the city, chain stores are apparently more than welcome in Lower Manhattan. “The transformation of Broadway with Urban Outfitters, Zara and the Gap has been really wonderful to see,” Jessica Lappin, president of the Downtown Alliance, told the paper.

Robert Yaro, the head of the Regional Planning Association, is retiring, The Wall Street Journal reports. Thomas Wright, the organization’s executive director, will succeed him.

Even though a lot of New Yorkers are mystified by the signs that the DOT has hung around Manhattan as part of a public art initiative, thieves are really huge fans of the work and absconded with 40 of the 50 signs, according to DNAInfo. Which is a lot even for the DOT, whom we are certain is well-acquainted with street sign theft.